The Oath

The card with the oath on it was printed in large type, which she had been told, and her hand holding it was not shaking, which she had not been told and had not expected.

Esther read the words aloud to a room that had gone quiet for her. The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Her voice came back to her off the panelling a fraction late, the way it had in the empty court with Mr Pym, and she handed the card to the usher and put both hands on the ledge of the witness box and did not look to her right.

Not yet. She had decided that in the bath at a quarter to seven, in four foot six of cold water, turning at the taps. She would not look at the dock until she had a reason to, and then she would look for as long as the reason lasted, and not a second after.

“Would you tell the jury your full name, please?”

Clare Nicholls had stood up. She looked different in a wig; it took the grey from the front of her hair and made her somebody’s idea of a barrister, and then she spoke and was herself again.

“Esther Mayhew.”

“And what do you do, Ms Mayhew?”

· · ·Scene break

Aled had walked her as far as the door.

That was the rule, and it had been the rule since a car on a dark road on the eighth of February, and she had known it was coming the way you know a step is there in the dark. The twenty-two yards of blue carpet from the witness suite. Nineteen seconds. He had timed them again that morning without taking his phone out; she had watched his lips not move. The corridor had been empty. Nobody had come out of the gents.

At the door of Court Three the usher had been waiting, a man with a gown over his suit and a clipboard, and Aled had stopped a yard short of him and stood with his back to the wall.

“I’ll be here,” he said.

“I know where you’ll be.”

He had nodded, once, as though she had given him a time he agreed with. Then the usher had opened the door and the sound of the room had come out, a great many people being quiet, and she had gone in, and the door had closed behind her with a sigh of its closer, and he was on the other side of it. He would stand there all day. He would not hear one word.

She had not known until the door closed how much she had been counting on the back of the room. On the visit he had stood at the back, by the door, placed without looking placed, and she had known where he was without turning. Today the place by the door had a police officer in it she had never seen, a big young man with his hat under his arm, and the whole of the back of the room was strangers.

She did it alone. She had asked for that, in a sense. She had spent three weeks making sure of it.

· · ·Scene break

Nicholls took her through who she was. Chartered accountant. Forensic work, eight years of it. The firm in Bristol, Garside Venn, and what it did, and what she had done there. The refinancing, two years ago: a lender asked to put nine million pounds against the Tyrer group’s lettings, and Esther sent in to look at the books first, because that was what a lender paid for.

“And what did you look at?”

“The rent.”

“Why the rent?”

“Because that’s what the loan was going to be paid back out of,” she said. “If you’re lending against flats, the flats are the security and the rent is the income. You want to know the rent’s real.”

There were screens along the front of the jury benches, one to every two chairs, and the Crown had put her first schedule on them. She watched twelve heads go down to it. She could have told them what was on it without looking. Two hundred and twelve flats. Sixty-one paying in cash. Round sums, every month, for six years, and never once late.

She told them. She told them well. She could hear herself doing it: the figures in their right order, the percentages to one place, the monthly totals, the fact that across sixty-one tenancies and seventy-two months there was not a single month in which a single tenant had paid a single day late. Four thousand three hundred and ninety-two payments. She had the number. She gave them the number.

Nicholls let her. Then, in the same pleasant voice, she said, “Ms Mayhew, why does that matter?”

Esther stopped.

The second juror from the left in the front row was a woman in a green cardigan who had written everything down for twenty minutes. She had stopped writing. She was looking at Esther over the top of her screen with the face of someone waiting to be told what she was for.

“Because real people are late,” Esther said.

It came out shorter than she had meant, and plainer, and she heard the room hear it.

“Real people go on holiday in August and pay double in September. They lose their job. They have a baby and forget. Sixty-one households and none of them ever had a bad month.” She let go of the ledge with one hand. “It wasn’t that the money was cash. It was that it was perfect. And money that’s perfect when it shouldn’t be is usually money somebody’s arranged.”

The woman in the green cardigan wrote that down.

· · ·Scene break

“You asked to see one of the flats,” said Nicholls.

“Flat fourteen.”

“Why that one?”

“It was the first one in the list that paid cash.” That was true, and it was dull, and she let it be dull. “I didn’t choose it for any reason. I’d have asked for any of them.”

“And did you see it?”

“The letting agent took me. He didn’t want to. He said the tenant worked nights.” She thought of the stairwell, the smell of somebody else’s cooking on the landing below, the key that stuck. “It was empty.”

“What do you mean by empty?”

She could have told them about the absence of a tenancy file, and the meter readings, and the council tax. She had forty pages on it. She could feel the forty pages in her mouth like a sweet she had been told not to eat.

“There was nothing in it,” she said instead. “No bed. No curtains. There was a fridge in the kitchen with its door propped open with a folded beer mat, the way you’d leave a fridge you’d switched off, so it doesn’t go mouldy. The electric was off at the box. There was no post on the mat. Somebody had been picking the post up.” She looked at the jury, not at Nicholls. “And I thought, somebody pays three hundred and fifty pounds a month for this, in cash, and has never been late.”

“Did you see any others?”

“Four. The same day. Two on the same landing and two in the next block.” She did not need the note. “They were all the same. One had the beer mat as well.”

Somebody in the jury laughed, very briefly, and stopped, and she saw the judge not look up.

She was better after that. She could feel it. It was not that she stopped giving them figures; they needed the figures, and Nicholls led her back to them, schedule by schedule, the thirty-eight companies and the haulage yard and the three car washes and the six years. But she had found the place where the figures went into the room, and she kept finding it. Why does that matter? Nicholls asked her four more times before lunch, in the same tone, and each time she had an answer that a woman in a green cardigan could write down.

The judge rose at five to one.

· · ·Scene break

She could not tell him anything.

She sat in the small room of the witness suite with a sandwich Imran had bought and ate half of it, and Aled stood inside the door, and Mr Pym brought tea on his doily and went away again, and the sign in three languages said what it said. She was in the middle of her evidence. She could talk about the weather, and her mother, and the sandwich. She could not say I did it. She could not say I found the place.

“You’ve got colour back,” Aled said.

It was the only thing he said. It was about her face, which was not evidence, and he said it looking at the wall clock and not at her.

“Have I.”

“You’d none this morning.”

She ate the other half of the sandwich, to have something to do with her hands, and looked at the frosted window, and thought that if he had been anyone else in the world she would have told him about the beer mat. She would have told him about the woman in green. She would have told him, with her hands flat on the table and her voice going long, and he would have listened the way he listened to the house.

He was the only one she would have told, and he was the only one she could not, and she had known that since the car on the eighth and it was no easier for being old.

“Ten to two,” he said.

“Ten to.”

· · ·Scene break

In the afternoon Nicholls came to the site meeting.

It had been in the Tyrer group’s own office, above one of the car washes, in a room with a long table and a coffee machine that nobody offered her anything from. The lender’s man. Colley, with the ledgers. Roland Tyrer at the head of the table, in a jumper. She had asked her questions about the cash rent, politely, the way she asked all her questions. She had mentioned flat fourteen.

“What happened then?” said Nicholls.

“Mr Tyrer spoke to me.”

“Before you tell the jury what he said, Ms Mayhew. Did you make a note of it?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“That night. Twenty to midnight.” She could see the page. The thirty-first of the black notebooks, feint-ruled, her own hand gone smaller than usual. “At home. I was sitting on the edge of the bath.”

“Why the bath?”

She had not expected that. She should have. Nicholls had not asked her anything all day she could not have expected, and now she had.

“It was the only room in the flat with a lock,” Esther said.

There was a pause in the room. It was not long. She heard someone in the press bench write something and stop.

“Is the note in front of you?”

It was. The usher had put the exhibit on the ledge that morning, the thirty-first notebook in a clear bag, open at the page, and she had not looked at it. She looked at it now. Her own writing. The date. The time. Seven words, and a name.

“Would you read it to the jury, please?”

She did not read it.

She turned her head to the right.

Nine of her paces and a pane of glass. She had counted them on the visit, standing where she stood now, and she had assumed, because it was how she would have arranged the room to be read, that the principal defendant would sit in the chair on the left.

He was in the middle chair.

She had been wrong. It did not matter at all. She noticed that it did not matter, and filed it, and looked at him.

Roland Tyrer was sixty-three and smaller than he had been at the head of a table. He had a grey suit on that fitted him in the shoulders and not at the neck, and his hands were on the ledge in front of him, one on top of the other, the way you would rest them on the top of a gate. He had been looking at the jury. When she turned her head he looked at her. It was the look she remembered, the whole of it: interested, and pleasant, and a little sorry for her, as though she were a waitress who had brought the wrong thing and was about to find out.

She did not look away. She did not look at the notebook.

“Some money,” she said, “doesn’t like to be counted, Miss Mayhew.”

She said it in his voice. She had not meant to. It came out with his weight in it, the pleasantness on money, the little fall on counted, the Miss put down on the table between them like a coin. She had said it to Kofi and to the analysts and to a lawyer from the Crown three times slowly, and to herself in the pool one word to a length, and she had never once said it like that. It had taken his face to give it back to him.

Roland Tyrer did not move. His hands stayed where they were on the ledge. After a moment, with no hurry at all, he looked back at the jury, as though she had finished.

She had not. She kept looking at him for the time it took to count to five, because five was what she had decided in the bath, and then she turned back to the room.

Every juror was looking at her. Not at the screens. At her. The woman in the green cardigan had not written anything down. She had her pen in her hand and her hand in her lap.

They’ll remember whether you looked at him.

“Thank you,” said Nicholls quietly. “And the note says?”

Esther looked down at it for the first time.

“The same,” she said. “Word for word.”

· · ·Scene break

The judge rose at twenty past four.

Before he did, he looked down at her over his glasses, and it was the first time all day he had spoken to her directly and not to counsel.

“Ms Mayhew, you’re in the middle of your evidence. Mr Lacey will ask you questions tomorrow. Until you’ve finished, you mustn’t discuss your evidence with anyone at all. Not the prosecution, not the police officers looking after you, not your family. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Your Honour.”

“Good. Ten o’clock.”

The usher opened the side of the box for her. She stepped down, a foot lower, into the room with everyone else in it, and walked to the door at the back with her eyes on the door, and the usher held it, and the corridor was there, and the blue carpet, and a yard from the door, with his back to the wall and his hands loose in front of him, where he had said he would be, Aled.

He looked at her face. She watched him do it. She watched him read the whole day off it the way she had read four years off a petrol receipt, and not say a word of what he read.

“Nineteen seconds,” he said.

“I know.”

· · ·Scene break

Imran drove. The lights came on along the motorway one after another, as they had on Monday, and he turned the radio off before the news without anybody asking.

She sat behind Aled with the notebook on her knee. Not the thirty-first; that was an exhibit now, in a bag, in a building. The forty-second, with the list folded in the back and the schedule of his preferences a few pages in front of it.

She could not tell him.

She could not tell him that she had looked. That she had turned her head and been wrong about the chair and not minded, and looked at a man for five seconds and given him his own sentence in his own voice, and that twelve people had stopped reading their screens. She could not tell him that she had been on her own at the back of that room and had managed. It was all evidence. Every word of it was the thing the whole three weeks had been for, and he was the one man in England she had arranged not to hear it.

In the sun-visor mirror she could see the side of his face. He was looking at the road. He had been looking at the road since the lane behind the court.

“Aled.”

“Yes.”

“One day I’m going to tell you about today.”

The car went on. Imran looked at the road with enormous attention.

She saw his face in the mirror not change, which was how she knew it had gone in. He was quiet for long enough that she thought that was his answer, and it would have been enough.

“All of it,” he said. “When you can. From the card.”

“From the card,” said Esther, and looked out of the window at the lights, and found she was not counting them.